I have to admit I got a little choked up when I saw the "Los Suns" jerseys the Phoenix basketball wore last night, in its game against the San Antonio Spurs. The move was in protest of the Arizona anti-immigration law. As Yahoo Sports' Trey Kerby notes, it's fairly rare to see a professional sports team risk alienating some fans. Even more surprising was the fact that the Spurs wanted to get "Los Spurs" jerseys too, but it was too late to do so.
The Major League Baseball Player's Association also came out against the Arizona law as well, and many are calling for next year's All-Star Game to be moved elsewhere. Both of these moves could be seen cynically, as an effort by the teams to not alienate their Latino fan bases, but quotes from officials and players have been explicitly political.
Those protests are important and very visible, since major league sports tend to exist on a special cultural higher plane. Meanwhile, though, anti-immigration efforts around the country are threatening to take form in actual policy. RaceWire writes about Minnesota's copycat legislation, introduced yesterday, and had already reported on South Carolina's effort to do the same.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that some feel that Americans are just deeply ambivalent about the presence of Latino immigrants. A majority of Americans support the Arizona bill, at the same time that a majority of independents support some form of amnesty for the immigrants who came here illegally but are already here.
I would buy that these laws were just an expression of a deep-seated ambivalence if I thought this really had to do more with immigration than race, but I don't think so. Arizona is stereotyping illegal immigrants as those who enter illegally from Mexico, either through crime or to involve themselves with crime, but one never hears people get up in arms over the nearly half of immigrants who are here illegally because they overstay a legal visa. Many of them come from countries that do not share a border with the U.S., and many are white. But the stories of those who mostly blend in isn't useful to anti-immigrant crusaders. Instead it's the the language of invasion, of America being sullied somehow, and that is mostly the language of racism.
-- Monica Potts
